How To Form New Habits & Create Change - Part 2

TLDR:

Follow these other 2 key steps to motivate people to change and form new habits. Part 2. Click here to read part one and the first two steps.

1. Make the behavior you want people to adopt as easy as possible.

2. Offer variety and uncertainty in your rewards to make it more exciting.

✍️ Why do we adopt things?

Do you remember the phone number of your childhood home, your parents, or your best friend from childhood? If you are like most people, you used to memorize these numbers by heart because we didn’t have mobile phones all the time and our brains were pushed to learn them. Fast forward to the last few years, you might only know your own number. From your friends or even your significant other, probably not, right?

Phones, calculators, Alexa, and AI Tools help us be faster and more productive. We adopt this new technology because it makes daily and tedious tasks more easy to overcome. And that is the key to adopting new products or habits. You have to make it easy for our brains to adopt them.

🧠 Our brains are lazy, that’s why we like the easy way

Practically the best way to get people to adopt new behaviors and change is to make it easy. Our brains are designed to save energy in case of an emergency. Our instincts and primal brains look to avoid difficult things to save our mental energy in case of an emergency. Hence, our brains prefer easy tasks more than difficult ones.

One way to do this is to break the behavior you want to achieve in small steps and actions. Researchers found that people were 8% more likely to donate the same amount of time if asked to commit for 4 hours a week vs. 200 hours per year. Committing to 200 hours seems like a lot if you are asked to do that from the get-go. But saying yes to smaller time commitments seems easier and reasonable. The same result was observed when motivating people to save money. It was easier to save $50 a week than $2.6K a year.

💡We like rewards. But we don’t like routine.

Another way to make new behaviors and changes stick is by making the rewards uncertain. This means that when you want to reward your audience you want to influence, the prize they get should vary so people don’t know exactly what the reward is. These rewards can be monetary, psychological, or anything else that might make your target group happy and motivated to act.

Researchers found that people prefer uncertain rewards, even if it means they get less value. They devided a group into two samples. One was offered $2 when completing a task and group two was offered a 50:50 chance to win either $1 or $2. Group one completed the tasks 43% of the time, while group two 70% of the time. Researchers argue that the main factor is the “thrill” and “excitement” we feel through the uncertainty that motivates us to act this way.

✅ How to apply this to your business

If you want people to adopt new behaviors and changes, you should make the process as easy as possible and include uncertainty in your rewards. For example, if you are doing trainings for your customers or your employees, try to make the sessions or videos shorter rather than longer. Let’s say you have a 3-hour on-demand video course, instead of doing 6x a 30-minute video, maybe do 12× 15-minute videos or vary between several 5-10-15 minute videos. This will likely motivate the audience to finish the training because it’s easier to consume and stay motivated.

Another example to make things easier on your website is to avoid unnecessary scrolling and try to make the desired action you want your customers to take with as little clicks as possible. Also, the checkout process should be seamless and easy to understand and follow. Don’t ask for super personal information or for creating an account if you don’t need it. It will just kill conversions.

And when it comes to uncertainty in your rewards, that is easy to implement. In your loyalty programs, instead of giving a 10% off or a small gift, mix it up a bit. Have some prizes that are greater in value and some lower. But more importantly, either communicate this with your customers or let them choose for themselves. This should increase their motivation and stick to behaviorsm programs, or adopt changes.

You could let your audience participate in giveaways, or if you have packed goods, you could include a golden ticket to win something nice. If you have a restaurant or a business where you get recurring customers like a gym, salon, coffee shop, etc. you could let your customers throw a dice and if they get a 6 or a 1, they would get a discount or a free extra product.

You can get creative in this part!

📖 Further information for you to dive deeper

• The Illusion of Choice - Richard Shotton

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Thanks so much for reading,

Juan Diego

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